Landslide a loose concept at best

President Ronald Reagan gives a thumbs-up to supporters at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles as he celebrates his re-election, Nov. 6, 1984, with first lady Nancy Reagan at his side. Reagan's win over Walter Mondale, 525 to 13 in the electoral vote and 59 percent to 41 percent in popular votes, was unquestionably a landslide election. (AP Photo/File)
— AP

President Ronald Reagan gives a thumbs-up to supporters at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles as he celebrates his re-election, Nov. 6, 1984, with first lady Nancy Reagan at his side. Reagan's win over Walter Mondale, 525 to 13 in the electoral vote and 59 percent to 41 percent in popular votes, was unquestionably a landslide election. (AP Photo/File)
/ AP

WASHINGTON 
First, the easy ones: The 1936 election, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt beat Alf Landon 523 to 8 in the electoral vote and 61 percent to 37 percent in the popular vote, was definitely a landslide.

Ronald Reagan's 1984 win over Walter Mondale, 525 to 13 in the electoral vote and 59 percent to 41 percent in popular votes, that, too, was unquestionably a landslide.

With Barack Obama out front of John McCain in national polls and leading in many battleground states, various computer analyses hold out the possibility that Obama could claim 300 or more electoral votes. (It takes 270 electoral votes to win.) But there's no clear definition of what it takes to lay claim to the distinction of a landslide.

Ed Rollins, who helped engineer Reagan's 1984 runaway, defines a landslide as "any time you get over 300 or 320 electoral votes." He thinks Obama is on track for more than 300.

Kathleen Thompson Hill and Gerald N. Hill, in their book, "The Facts on File Dictionary of American Politics," say that while interpretations differ, a landslide might be 60 percent of the popular vote. That's a fairly steep hurdle these days, when the two parties have bases of around 40 percent of the electorate, leaving the other 20 percent to be fought over.

But the Hills, both professors at Sonoma State University, also say there are more nuanced ways to define a landslide.

"It usually means exceeding expectations and being somewhat overwhelming," Gerald Hill said. There's a sense of momentum, "like rocks coming down a mountain, and that seems to be what is happening" with the Obama campaign, he said.

Political columnist William Safire writes in his "Safire's Political Dictionary," that the word landslide made its appearance in the natural-disaster sense in 1838, and that headline writers began applying it in the political context a few years later. He defines it as "a resounding victory; one in which the opposition is buried."

Resounding victories in the Electoral College are not always reflected in the popular vote.

In 1988, the first President Bush drubbed Michael Dukakis 426-111 in the electoral vote, but the popular vote was closer, 53 percent to 46 percent. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the first of two lopsided victories over Adlai Stevenson, in 1952 came out ahead 442-89 in electoral votes while the margin was 55 percent to 44 percent in popular votes.

"Given the razor-thin margins of 2000 and 2004, a landslide is more difficult to define this cycle," said Robert Schmul, professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame. He concludes that "if a candidate doesn't receive over 100 electoral votes, that candidate is clearly a victim of a landslide." He said that in all such cases over the past half-century, the winning popular-vote margin approached or exceeded 10 percentage points.